Trump as been tweeting lately about the silent majority.
I think Dean was in a position to know about Nixon’s “silent (or silence) majority” but at the time just about everyone believed it was real, that there were very many people who agreed with the administration’s stances and supported Nixon but never really said much about it.
So – was there really a Silent Majority in the early 1970s? Is there one today?
I would believe Dean, he does state that “data showed it was nonexistent”.
That said, I could see that it would be something we nowadays would term a “meme”. Once the concept of a “silent majority” is out there, some number of people will latch onto it for self identification. Now, whether they actually are a majority (or even silent) is probably where the data suggests otherwise.
He doesn’t cite the data, though, and the data I’ve seen shows that Nixon did have a ‘silent majority’ who weren’t out protesting but did answer polls. Nixon had a 60% approval rating for his actions on Vietnam while Trump currently has a 33% approval rating for his handling of race relations. As far as I’ve ever read, Nixon did have broad support and polls (and election results) generally showed him with solid approval even in the midst of protests, at least until Watergate brought everything crashing down. There wasn’t anywhere near universal agreement with him by any stretch, but he was getting above 50% approval ratings and election returns.
Here’s a CNN article on the topic that matches my understanding of Nixon’s ‘silent majority’. Silent majorities are a misnomer | CNN Politics
I think 2016 really did a number on everyone’s minds, whether D or R. It has convinced many on both sides of the aisle that Trump’s support is stronger than evidenced in the polls, to the point where many still believe Trump will somehow eke out victory in this November’s election.
That being said, there is indeed a phenomenon in Trump’s favor: Social-desirability bias. Since supporting Trump is usually regarded as a lot more loathsome than supporting Biden, it stands to reason that a lot more Trump voters would stay silent about their views (in the presence of their Biden supporting family and friends and coworkers) than vice versa. So Trump probably is a tad stronger than what the polls show - however, probably nowhere close to a majority.
Perhaps “The Silent Bigger-than-thought Minority.”
I’d have to see the exact context for Dean’s quote. Is he saying that the proper phrasing should have been the “Silent Plurality”? That may be true but it’s a hell of a lousy slogan.
The cultural meaning of Silent Majority was obvious to everyone under Nixon. He was demonizing the college students and antiwar movement. They were loud but not numerous in the sense of percentage of the total adult population. A much larger segment, the one he aimed his rhetoric at, may or may not have been explicitly antiwar but they supported law and order, were on the side of the cops, and hated the privileged mostly-white college kids who were demonstrating. Additionally, they hated and feared the mostly-black civil rights protesters and the increasingly militant black organizations that were springing up. They didn’t want change. They wanted their world of the 1950s back.
I was in college then. Most peoples’ parents were part of the Silent Majority, because they were truly a far larger percentage of the population and we were in fact rebelling against our parents’ generation, and often against our parents in particular. From our point of view - and, I would argue, from history’s point of view - we were rebelling for excellent reasons.
But we were definitely the minority. We got crushed. Nixon won in 1972 in a landslide, leading to the ascension of conservatism for next 50 years. Which is exactly why we are now fighting that same war over again. This time it appears that we might have a slight majority, or at least plurality, ourselves.
The battle lines have changed little over the decades. I continue to hold that Trump is not some aberration that emerged from nowhere. He is the logical culmination of a half-century of nativist thought. He is what his side has wanted and mostly always got at lower political levels. The earlier versions weren’t seen nationally and the national leaders knew how to disguise the sharp edges. Trump has no disguises. He is all id, the leader of the Loud Minority. If they are not stopped this time, there won’t be 50 years of submission. I fear all-out civil war.
Trump and his extremely vocal supporters can’t simultaneously say the polls are fake because they have a silent majority who don’t share their support out loud but also brag about seeing no yard signs or stickers for Biden. Because if you put two and two together, despite having little in-your-face show of support, Biden is leading most polls outside the margin of error (some by double digits) therefore it’s he who has a silent majority.
I remember Agnew mouthing off about this along with Nixon. Even then the idea that a majority of Americans was silent about anything wasn’t credible.
Noting that Wikipedia says prior usage of ‘The Silent Majority’ referred to people who were dead, definitely a majority, and mostly silent save for some unconfirmed reports.
This. All this.
I wonder if the sixties and seventies were the first time in U.S. history that a generational divide that wide had developed.
At least in terms of culture, a generational gap developed during the 1920s. It mostly went away as the result of the Great Depression and WWII but came back in the 1950s.
A lot of that was due to the sheer numbers: the Baby Boom meant that people under 25 were a far larger proportion of the total population than in previous periods. Combine that with a surging consumer economy that meant marketing to the (then) under-25s, and you had an explosion of attention that lent significance to everything the sixties-and-seventies kids did.
That one may have been due to the one-two punch of the Great War and the Spanish Flu pandemic. The social upheaval caused by both, combined with greater leisure due to the mass migration from farm work to city jobs, led to discontent expressed in both art and general culture.
What Nixon tried to convey with the “silent majority” meme was that there were people who agreed with him and his politics who were not outspoken about it (certainly plausible) and that furthermore this group of people constituted a majority of the population (how could anyone know that if they are keeping their moufs shut)?
It must have been true during his first term, because he got re-elected in 1972 with one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) landslides in American history.
All indications were that Nixon, especially later in his second term, did NOT have a majority of the population, silent or otherwise, behind him.
This is a good point. All the polls in 2016 said that Hillary would win. She didn’t. The “silent majority” came through for Donald Trump. Those who think this can’t happen again do so at their own peril.
Which is exactly why Biden is outfundraising Trump, and why there are a flood of new voters registering, and why money is pouring into local races to turn them blue, and why armies of volunteers are roaming the grassroots, and why multiple groups are creating devastating campaign ads.
It’s ironic that the more they get reminded that Trump pulled off a totally fluke, whisker-thin victory in a 2016 election that looks nothing at all like the 2020 campaign, the harder they’re working to ensure that the fluke doesn’t happen a second time.
Keep 'em scared!
Here’s another example.
In addition to the ad buy, which will materialize closer to November, the party is also doubling down on its commitment to get 2 million Texans registered to vote for November. This plays into the party’s already established strategy of winning back the state House this cycle.
“Silent majority” here is kind of like “holy roman empire”, huh?
Agreed. “Susie Sorority” helped pull it off for Nixon in '72 so who’s to say Trump can’t either. Certainly hope not, but one can never rule that out.
This is an inaccurate account of the polls in 2016. They showed Hillary had a small but steady lead in national polling, which was accurate. They also showed she had a small but steady lead in the electoral college, which was accurate except for three states (WI, MI, and PA).
The polling error in 2016 was about average compared to other elections. It seemed bigger because the election was so close, and because public opinion thought Hillary had a much larger lead than the polls indicated.
Read Nate Silver if you want an accurate understanding of the polls in 2016 and what this might indicate for 2020.
Yes. The claim that some “‘silent majority’ came through for Donald Trump” in 2016 is highly misleading. It certainly implies that a majority of 2016 voters wanted Trump–an implication which we know to be false. Trump lost the popular vote, and as andy’s reply noted, won the Electoral College only because he got thin majorities in three states.
The false narrative that a Silent Majority wanted Trump in 2016, much less that a majority of Americans (silent or not) want him in 2020, is appearing in propaganda here and there. No doubt this notion is prominent, as a meme to push, among the Post-It notes stuck to quite a few right-wingers’ monitors.